Performance during Overclocking

Besides the tests in nominal mode, we would also like to compare the mainboards’ performance in overclocked systems. The thing is that relative performance of overclocker platforms is very often different from what we see in nominal mode.

For the second round of tests we decided to set the FSB frequency at 450MHz. We used the same Core 2 Extreme X6850 processor overclocked to 3.6GHz set as 8 x 450MHz. The processor Vcore was increased to 1.45V to ensure better stability. DDR2 memory was running at 1080MHz and the timings were set at 4-4-4-12.

Let’s start with results of synthetic benchmarks:

During overclocking the situation changes dramatically. Looks like the FSB frequency increase causes the memory controllers to work differently. It is partially explained by the fact that these two platforms set secondary timings differently during overclocking.

Asus P5E

Asus P5K Premium

That is why the results in complex benchmarks and real applications turn out so diverse.

However, Asus P5E performed quite well here. This Intel X38 based mainboard outpaces the rival on Intel P35 in most tasks.